Sony Sets Bold PlayStation 4 Sales Targets – Report.

Without any doubts, Sony Corp. has very high expectations for its PlayStation 4 video game system and the company clearly plans to make it much more popular than the PlayStation 3. Even though Sony Computer Entertainment has not yet announced details not related to video games, we can judge about the company’s ambitions based on alleged manufacturing targets for the PS4.

Sony projects to sell 16 million PlayStation 4 video game consoles, presumably in the first year of availability, according to a report from DigiTimes web-site that cites sources from PS4 component makers. As expected, Sony intends to start production of its next-generation video game systems sometimes in August, 2013, which will make it possible e for the company to start actual sales of the PS4 consoles in late October – November timeframe.

Sony intends to contract Foxconn Technology Group (Hon Hai Precision Industries) and Pegatron Technology to make the PlayStation 4 game console. Sony will also likely use its own EMCS facility to build the systems.

While the original news-story from DigiTimes claims that Sony wants to sell whopping 16 million PlayStation 4 game consoles in 2013 (which essentially means Q4 2013), it is impossible for any console maker to sell 16 million game systems in one quarter. Sony sold 3.61 million PlayStation 3 consoles in its launch fiscal year 2006 (from November, 2006, till March 31, 2007). For the full FY2007 (from April, 2007, to March 31, 2008) the company sold 9.24 million PlayStation 3 consoles, according to Sony's annual report. Therefore, it is likely that Sony plans to sell 16 million PS4 consoles in its first year of availability, or even in the first year fiscal year + the launch window (November 2013 – March 31, 2015).

Sony PlayStation 4 is based on a semi-custom AMD Fusion system-on-chip that integrates eight AMD x86 Jaguar cores, custom AMD Radeon HD core with unified array of 18 AMD GCN-like compute units (1152 stream processors which collectively generate 1.84TFLOPS of computer power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two), various special-purpose hardware blocks as well as multi-channel GDDR5 memory controller.

The PS4 will come with 8GB of unified GDDR5 memory sub-system (with 176GB/s bandwidth) for both CPU and GPU as well as large-capacity hard disk drive. Sony PS4 will be equipped with Blu-ray disc drive capable of reading BDs at 6x and DVDs at 8x speeds, USB 3.0 connectivity in addition to a proprietary aux port, Gigabit Ethernet port, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR wireless technology as well as HDMI, optical and analog outputs. The new system will also utilize new DualShock 4 game controller with integrated touchpad as well as better motion sensing thanks to new PS4 Eye tracking cameras.

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Did you even think before you posted the question? The Titan has 1.3 Tflops of Double Precision and it costs $1000 USD, while HD7970GE has about 1.075 Tflops. Both of those GPUs use nearly 240W of power. Neither of these is obviously possible for a console. 1.84 Tflops of double precision is actually physically impossible right now.

Regardless, double precision is a meaningless metric for videogames. The specs for PS4's GPU have been out for a long time:

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Given inflation over 7 years (~16% as of now) and figuring they believe there is a direct correlation between price and units sold, 16 million makes sense if the system ASP is 2/3 of the ps3, or ~$400 at the high-end (which is what we keep hearing). That of course is rounding to 16 million from what could be a real estimate of give or take ~500,000 and hence a few dollars one direction or the other.